Daring Bakers in December: Yule Log

December 22, 2007 at 9:25 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, daring bakers, groups, sweet things | 54 Comments

‘Tis the season…to eat cake shaped like tree branches!  I love holiday baking (wish I’d gotten to do more of it this year) and I absolutely love yule log, or Bûche de Noël.  If you were wondering what the Daring Bakers would be up to for the holidays, this is it!  Or hosts, the co-founders of the group, Ivonne and Lisa chose a yule log, a symbol of light and warmth for this month’s challenge.

A Bûche de Noël is usually a genoise sponge cake rolled up with a filling, cut to resemble a log and frosted with buttercream.  Then it gets all kinds of slightly wacky decorations.  Mushrooms are a traditional yule log decoration.  Don’t worry–I’m taking about sweet sugar mushrooms!  We were able to chose to make our ‘shrooms from either meringue or marzipan. Not being a huge marzipan fan, I went the meringue route.  I dusted them with cocoa and a little gold luster dust.  My log came from a magical, sparkley forest!

I have made a couple of yule logs in the past, so I knew the general drill. The genoise sponge we used was slightly different from ones I’ve made in the past. This one had no butter and used cornstarch…more like a ladyfinger recipe I’ve used many times. I decided to keep my sponge plain in flavor, but I was worried it would dry out in the fridge, so I soaked it with a rum simple syrup before rolling it. We had to use coffee buttercream to frost the cake (which was fine by me),  and it was made Swiss-meringue style.

I didn’t have any real problems making the yule log.  The most difficult part was deciding on a filling, as we could chose whatever we wanted to roll our cakes up with.  I decided to do a chocolate mousse filling.  It set up nicely and went well with the coffee and rum flavors in the other components.  Decorating the cake was a lot of fun, and we certainly had no difficulty eating it up!

I am flying to the States today for the holidays. I’m very excited about the trip, but it means I may not be able to comment on as many of my fellow DBer’s posts as I would like. I apologize for that, but do check out the Daring Bakers’ blogroll and see all the beautiful Bûche that were made!  Ivonne has the recipe on her site.  Happy holidays!